iTunes Gift Cards now available via Facebook

Gifting iTunes Gift Cards to your family and friends has just gotten a whole lot easier, thanks to the added ability to send them as digital cards right from Facebook. So if you see that it’s your FB friend’s birthday (or any other occasion), simply head over to their page and click on the “Gift” icon. Once the iTunes option has been selected, you can purchase them in denominations of $10/$15/$25/$50 and pay with your credit card. You can even recommend albums, movies, games, apps, and more to go along with the e-card. Can’t find the Gift button on your friend’s page (located above box area where you post on someone’s wall)? Unfortuntely, the gifting feature is currently only available in the US.

And as noted by AllThingsD, it’s not surprising that iTunes gift cards have come to Facebook, with retailers getting a nice cut for each GC sold.

Per Apple’s last 10-K, the company generated $7.5 billion from the iTunes Store during fiscal year 2012. Industry sources say that more than $2 billion of that revenue comes directly from iTunes gift cards. Sources also tell us that existing retailers who sell iTunes gift cards (like Best Buy, Target and the like) usually keep around 13 percent of each gift-card dollar sold.

So that adds up to around, say, a $260 million market size for physical iTunes cards split among participating retailers, of which Facebook will now be an active participant. That pie is small compared to Facebook’s overall revenue ($3.71 billion in 2011), but another digital product with less overhead and high demand is definitely a win for Facebook’s Gifts department. Not to mention the potential boost Facebook’s massive billion-user distribution could give on iTunes gift-card sales overall.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday may have just passed, but with the Christmas season approaching, you can bet that Facebook will be selling a whole bunch of iTunes Gift Cards in the coming weeks. Of course, if you don’t use Facebook, you can always just buy them directly from iTunes (both email gift certificates and physical cards are available).